


Aphelion

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, During Canon, Gen, No Dialogue, Pre-Canon, Sort Of, i love this space cowboy so heres a rlly long space metaphor, its like angst lite with a lot of metaphor and imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-17
Updated: 2019-05-17
Packaged: 2020-03-06 06:04:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18845134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: aphelion (n) - ə-fē′lē-ənthe point of a celestial object's orbit that is farthest from the sun.





	Aphelion

**Author's Note:**

> i told myself i wasnt gonna write anything for rnm but i love michael too much so here we are fjdhfks

Michael Guerin had lived his life with nebula eyes glued to the sky and meteorite trails bruising his skin. Hollow beneath the throat, behind the ear, slope of the nose, hand, hand, hand. Silicon, oxygen, nickel, and iron - all fighting to leave the the darkest mark, the flashiest sign. A buzzing arrow in broken neon that said, "This way for a scarred sky and a remorseful man."

(There was a smaller sign beneath that which announced ticket prices having been slashed from damnation to a meager acceptance of the sorrow he would bring.)

*

When they were sixteen, before they'd ever had to debate heaven and hell or well-meaning demons and unwanting gods, Isobel tried to revamp his image in a way that was not unlike the puppy training courses one would find in a derelict Petsmart. He'd gone along with it on some half-cocked urge to be something other than he was because what he was seemed like three-quarters to a world of wholes.

He'd learned to sit with relative ease, playing dead had been far too easy and far too useful, but he'd never learned how to stay. 

(He'd picked up shake for what had amounted to as many months as years he'd been alive, but then his will to make peace had boarded a plane for basic training and he was left spitting his own kind of shrapnel. Some tricks were for untattered people, and he'd be damned if he wasn't the most threadbare boy in town.)

*

That wasn't the first time that Isobel had tried to do her startlingly human magic, though. When they were kids - shit, probably thirteen, all headstrong and fiery and stupid as hell - he'd picked up the habit of shaking is hand through his curls. It drove Isobel to the brink and back a dozen times a day, but she'd found clicking pens as a relief for her neuroticism that same year, so the feeling was mutual.

While Michael had resorted to swapping her pens for pencils - or removing the springs and watching her seeth if he was feeling particularly brother-like - Isobel had birthed her own mysticism with a spear-like tongue - pale and calculated for the berry-red, true center of the target.

 _If you don't stop,_ she'd say to him when his knobby, half-grown knuckles shuffled between still tightly wound and rounded hairs. _You're going to shake stardust out._

If she'd gotten to that one even just a year earlier, it might have worried him. He'd turned twelve and listened to every word that came out of their mouths with reverence. He'd turned thirteen and couldn't pay attention to the shapes of their mouths around warning words for all the blood in his own.

Still, it was just like Isobel to say. Mean and poetic all wrapped in one. He'd taken it to the heart, sure, but to the wrong one. Instead of ventricles and arteries - or whatever it was they had, health classes barely covered enough human anatomy as it was - he'd taken that concept to a heart that still dripped Milky Way blood with Venusian coloring and held Saturnian rings 'round the circumference.

He'd liked the thought in his heart of hearts. That he could shake free some deeply lodged part of a home he wasn't sure existed, and if it did, damn sure didn't want him. That was also when he started believing contradiction was what held his threads together, and what would keep him alive within the full throttle life that he saw coming on human intuition alone.

*

At fourteen, he found that his pliability was hardening like the baked concrete of Roswell's most historical streets. He was soft and he was strained, he was tough and he was breaking, he was lonely but he wasn't searching, he was still the same on the outside but on the inside he was something less-than-more-than his already prominent otherness.

*

At fifteen, he was bang-crash-pow-ingly quiet. Eyes with a few less stars and lips hiding a few more teeth and hands that drummed on every surface they could touch because there was so much fucking want slipping through him he couldn't breathe.

He didn't have much thought for galactic hopes at fifteen.

*

At sixteen, he was sure that he was unsure about everything in life, but that was the way the paint of the diamond fell and the cowhide smacked aluminum.

Roswell didn't have a ballfield, but they did have a dusty cutout where the locals could gather by summer heat and starlight. Every time he let himself find his way there he'd push his back against chainlink - mindful and certain of the cold pain - and spit sunflower seed shells to the clay beneath his already battered shoes, wondering if anything he touched would ever grow. Doubtful. He wasn't Jack and his beanstalk as much as he was the wasted beans.

His hands didn't do much good, he didn't think. They solved problems and made music, but mostly they got him into fights and into trouble and into principal offices and into new group homes and into foster families that were far too familiar with hands and with hurt. 

He was close to some kind of end at sixteen- but couldn't give up on anything if his life depended on it. Not yet, anyway. He still had to learn that one.

Still, despite his best efforts at- not home, home wasn't anywhere his siblings weren't - the vines still shriveled and the fruit still rotted from core to hull. 

*

At seventeen, he was nothing and everything. He was the kid your parents didn't want you hanging around with, but was top of every class he cared about. He was fierce and silent and donning darkened eyes that colored under lack of sleep and lack of space and dreaming in excess because try as he _might_ he couldn't keep his eyes off the horizon like a seasick greenhorn despite knowing he would never leave his shithole hometown.

Contradictory as a beginning, contradictory as an end. At least he'd found a pocketful of stars again.

*

When he was seventeen and five sixths - these distinctions were important when you were seventeen and felt like you were rapidly losing your grip on the ledge you'd been hanging off of since puberty hit - he thought Isobel may have been right. His greatest contradiction, perhaps. Somehow a thought that was both a betrayal to his core and in line with every breath he took.

*

His hair had loosened the older he'd gotten and the less inhibition he'd harbored in his tightly-wound, scrawny little chest. No more corkscrews, just spools of hair like that of baby dolls shoved to the back of closets and beneath beds and into the shelves of any Goodwill that wasn't looking too hard. 

Or, in his case, beneath stained and hanging on by less than a thread baseball caps to keep them from flintlock eyes, lest they spark and catch fire.

Despite that change, he had never stopped his patdowns, even if he could hear Isobel's voice haunting his fingertips. _You'll shake the stardust right out._

He would always check his palms, waiting for the day they came back dewy with every wish and broken promise he'd given up on in his seventeen and five sixths. It never came, not for him, not for his battered, grease-slick, taught-skinned hands.

No, he didn't believe in stardust curls until guitar-string calloused, untouched by his father's war, gentle-is-like-gentle-does hands had seemed to glow as they dipped in and out of lemon juice highlights and pencil-rolled perfection. 

Michael wrote checks he didn't know would bounce with a mouth that burned from the weight of the truths he suffered after so long of bleeding black hole lies. 

All for lamplight hands that guided the canary through the coal mine heart.

Inevitably, with a great shudder and the softest footfall, that had ended and Michael was left trying to right his orbit again. He never quite did. 

He was back trying to find a way off- planet, track, course, what the hell ever. Didn't matter anymore.

*

At eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, he was slumped into a nadir, acetone-rotten breath exhaled to the sky every night from a cracked lawn chair in the middle of the desert. At eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, he was still foolish enough to hope, pray, believe that if he was in the New Mexico desert under a crossstitch sky, it was as good as another desert across the fucking world below that same sky.

(It wasn't and never would be.)

*

By twenty-two and twenty-three, it was an absolute fucking miracle, or maybe an act of a god who wanted after all, that he didn't end up in the small-town morgue of any adjacent county.

(If he was going to die, like hell was he doing it in Roswell. He'd already lost enough of himself there.)

*

At twenty-three and a half - these distinctions were important when you were twenty-three and had been counting the minutes you had left by each drop from the bottle to the bow of your mouth - a part of him came home, and yet he still felt as scattered as ashes.

He didn't attend the parade, but he did think of lemon juice and hands stuck with the weight of so many worlds. He bought a six pack and discarded it one by one under the same desert sky he'd hope, prayed, believed under. For the first time in a while looked down at his hands and wondered- something.

* 

At twenty-four he had what some would call a change of heart, but what Isobel posited to be nothing more than a quarter life crisis. Max, at least, feigned supportive and called it 'personal growth.' Michael had only wanted to know what seminar those ten dollar words had come from.

But instead of buying a motorcycle or chasing after things he couldn't have anymore, he set his course for the zenith, and refused to stop until he got there.

*

At twenty-five he had more questions than answers, but was made of more answers than questions. Nothing added up, but that didn't stop him from pressing graphite to paper and his forehead to the cool countertop in his Airstream as he tried, nevertheless, to puzzle it all out. 

Always the classes he cared about.

* 

At twenty-six he scraped by on the skin of his teeth and the breadth of the dust-clotted felt of his wide-brimmed hat.

*

At twenty-seven, though, he dragged his nebula eyes back to earth at the call of his traitorous, dwarf planet heart. His skin was still patterned with lingering contusions, but they started to heal in jagged pathways. His signs were temporarily out of order, the lettering wiped clean and the price of admission only words spoken by ten-year-old wants.

A kiss at the hollow beneath the throat. Words stuck to the skin behind the ear. Pad of the thumb pressed to the slope of the nose. Clenched hand, aching hand, intertwined hands.

*

At older than he was but younger than he would be, he was- he was.

Silicon, oxygen, nickel, and iron. The only kind of meteorite that touched his skin ever again was the band on the chain around his neck.

The signs were still planted firmly in the ground, though their flashes were long gone, now reading, "This way for the man who can define amends and point out rock-bottom from his patch of stable ground."

He still dreamed of potluck stars and Uranian-tinted galaxies, still pointed his eyes along a Meridian toward whatever was out there and wanted to find the edge of the fucking universe. But it wasn't quite so urgent anymore, was out of curiosity instead of the malnourished cravings of an influenced child, boy, man.

Most of all, he settled into his final contradiction. Could find peace in the day as well as he did in the night. He wondered, maybe, if it was just another one of Isobel's tricks he never mastered the first time around. But something told him it had just needed to be shook out, having been buried under stardust for so long.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on tumblr @foxmulldr !!


End file.
